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The Strange World of Twitter

This post has nothing to do with horse racing but...

I don't consider myself a professional "tweeter", more like a rank amatuer that uses the technology in a very basic manner.  SB Nation makes it easy for authors to tweet new stories to the Twittersphere with a check of a box at the bottom of the "New Post" interface, which is about all I do with the service.  

A Twitter widget on the main page tracks the number of re-tweets of a story and most of the time the re-tweets aren't anything to take note of.  And other times they seem flat out odd.  Take the post from this morning entitled "Sidney's Candy, Technology, and the 2,000 Guineas".  As of the time I wrote this post, that story has been "tweeted" nine times, including my initial twitterization.  A few of the re-tweets are by folks that follow me - nothing unusual about that.  The others, however, are a bit more perplexing.

Three of the other re-tweets, including two that have re-tweeted the story twice today, are people who either write or follow news about candy.  Real candy.  Like M&Ms, or licorice, or anything else that you give out on Halloween.  And the only reason I can see that they've re-tweeted my story is due to the fact that the word "candy" is in the title.  Never mind that Sidney's Candy is not something that you'll be able to pick up at your local Wal-Mart prior to Halloween for $2.99 a bag.  If it's got candy in the title (apparently) it's good enough for a re-tweet.  

Of course, I'm not complaining about somebody wanting to spread some link love around the internet.  But you got to wonder what a follower of the "candy twitterers" is going to think when they click on the link and are not taken to a story about a new product called Sidney's Candy, but instead find themselves reading a post by a degenerate gambler (yours truly) wondering what races a four-year-old colt is going to run in over the next year.